Please join us in congratulating the following students who were selected by the Department of Architecture faculty this spring for the following competitive awards, fellowships, internships, and scholarships. Awards and prizes are given at the end of each academic year in recognition of outstanding scholarship and promise. Read more about each of the awards.

Celebrated architect I.M. Pei ’40 died on May 16 in New York City. He was 102. Over the course of a long international career, he designed notable buildings that included museums, cultural and research centers, civic buildings, and office towers. A dedicated modernist, he received the architecture world’s highest honors for his large body of work.

Among his best-known projects are the glass pyramid entrance pavilion he designed for the Louvre Museum in Paris, and the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

The Office of Graduate Education recently honored Huma Gupta as one of the 2019 Graduate Women of Excellence at their biennial celebration on Monday, April 29. Huma and her fellow honorees were nominated by members of the MIT community, and selected based on their leadership and service contributions, dedication to mentoring, and commitment to improving the student experience.

Henry A. Millon, a scholar of Renaissance and Baroque art and architecture who served on the faculty at MIT for almost 50 years, left a lasting legacy on his scholarly field through his own work and that of the many students he taught and advised.

In celebration of the Bauhaus centennial, MIT Virtual Experience Design Lab presents the Virtual Bauhaus, a virtual reality exhibition created by the Goethe-Institute Boston in collaboration with TH Köln. Presented as part of Wunderbar Together: The Year of German- American Friendship 2018/19 – an initiative funded by the German Federal Foreign Office, implemented by the Goethe-Institute, and supported by the Federation of German Industries (BDI).

Fall 2018 marked the 150th anniversary of MIT's first architecture class, making what is now the School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) home to the oldest architectural course of study in the United States. To mark the occasion, the department is celebrating with a diverse array of educational and social programming on campus throughout the academic year. The events will culminate in a symposium and alumni open house on campus April 12–13.

Vibrant, innovative cities most often result from powerful collaborations among diverse constituencies.

To support this ideal, the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism (LCAU) has announced the creation of a new interdisciplinary prize aimed at catalyzing innovative urban design and planning approaches worldwide, with a goal of improving the quality of life and environment for residents.

Before she was a PhD student searching through art history archives around the world, a young Nisa Ari attended museums with her family and tried to discern the histories behind the artwork and artifacts she saw. “It always had the appeal of detective work,” Ari says. Sometimes, when she’d walk into a new gallery, she’d challenge herself to identify artists from paintings at a distance: “That’s a Cézanne, that’s a Picasso, that’s a Léger.”

The Department of Architecture welcomes Rosalyne Shieh as the Marion Mahony Emerging Practitioner Fellow, and Hans Tursack, the Pietro Belluschi Teaching Fellow, for the 2018-2019 academic year. These Fellowships support architects and designers at various stages of their teaching and research careers.

Architect and planner remembered as a man who brought people together through a combination of wisdom, optimism, and charm.

Jean Pierre de Monchaux, an idealistic and optimistic planner and architect who served as dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning from 1981 to 1992, passed away on April 30, after living with Parkinson’s disease for 20 years. He was 81.

The construction and operation of all kinds of buildings uses vast amounts of energy and natural resources. Researchers around the world have therefore been seeking ways to make buildings more efficient and less dependent on emissions-intensive materials.

What if we could immerse ourselves in this UNESCO World Heritage Site through virtual reality or use augmented reality to interact with its 3-D site map?

"In order to digitally document and develop the foundations for future research, a laboratory team from the MIT Department of Architecture, led by Professor Takehiko Nagakura and PhD student Paloma Gonzales, has been working on the MISTI Global Seed Fund Machu Picchu Design Heritage project since 2016.

J. Meejin Yoon, professor and head of the Department of Architecture at MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, has been appointed the Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning at Cornell University. She will take up this new position on January 1, 2019. Andrew Scott, professor of architecture and urbanism, currently associate head of the department, has agreed serve as interim head starting August 15.

Nearly 150 alumni gathered at the New Museum for Contemporary Art in New York on June 22, 2018 to celebrate 150 years of architectural education at MIT; Fall 2018 marks 150 years since the first class of architecture students. The event, jointly organized by the Department of Architecture and the Architecture Alumni Affinity Group (MITArchA), coincided with the American Institute of Architects Convention and brought together alumni with current faculty and recent graduates.

Analysis points the way to energy-efficient systems that take a location-specific approach to cooling and dehumidifying places where people live and work.

About 40 percent of all the energy consumed by buildings worldwide is used for space heating and cooling. With the warming climate as well as growing populations and rising standards of living — especially in hot, humid regions of the developing world — the level of cooling and dehumidification needed to ensure comfort and protect human health is predicted to rise precipitously, pushing up global energy demand.

Flooding, on the rise due to climate change, can devastate urban areas and result in drawn-out, costly repairs. Cities are in dire need of new strategies to manage the influx of stormwater. An interdisciplinary team of engineers and urban planners at MIT has now developed a solution: multifunctional urban stormwater wetlands and ponds that seamlessly integrate the control and cleaning of stormwater with ecological and recreational benefits.

Historic building would create “design hub” for MIT, with benefits for surrounding community.

MIT has identified the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse as a potential new location for the School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P). The proposed move would let the Institute create a new hub for design research and education, allow the school to expand its full range of activities, and open new spaces for public use.

The building would need renovation, a process that would require approval from the City of Cambridge.

Please join us in congratulating Professor Leon Glicksman for receiving the 2018 Student Champion Award for First Year Advising!

Given by the Undergraduate Association, this award recognizes an advisor who has gone beyond the call of duty to be present in aspects of advisees' lives beyond academics, participating in student events and activities.

The Affordable Housing Development Competition, organized by the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston, annually brings together teams of graduate students in architecture, planning, finance, and policy with affordable-housing organizations to develop comprehensive proposals to address the needs of the organizations and local communities. Two interdisciplinary student teams received prizes for their projects that respect local interests and propose comprehensive design and development strategies.

Please join us in congratulating Mackenzie Muhonen (MArch ’19), one of three recipients of the 2018 Kohn Pederson Fox (KPF) Traveling Fellowship for her portfolio and proposal, "Learning from Love Motels: The Semiotics of a Civic Bedroom." Muhonen will travel to five cities in Brazil during a five-week trip this summer.

Stephanie Lee (MArch '19) and Ellen Shakespear (MArch/MCP '19) founded Spaceus to address issues of artistic practice and community engagement in a gentrifying city. Spaceus "rethinks how artists and communities interact and come together outside of galleries and museums. We do this by finding affordable, shared studio spaces for artists in vacant storefronts. We are experimenting with new ways of engaging the broader community with art through workshops, open studios—anything we can dream of together," they explain.

MIT faculty, students, and alumni will make significant contributions as exhibitors and curators at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. Considered one of the foremost global forums for architecture and the built environment and drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world, the Architecture Biennale takes place every two years in Venice, Italy.

"The notion of ‘artistic research’ has really taken hold and captured the imagination of the art world in the past fifteen years,” explains Gediminas Urbonas, associate professor in the Art, Culture & Technology (ACT) program in the MIT School of Architecture and Planning.

Recipients of the 2017 Research Awards and Travel Fellowships, including the Schlossman Research Award, the Louis C. Rosenberg Travel Fellowship, the Julian Beinart Research Award, and the Marvin E. Goody Award, present their work to the department in April 2018. More information on each award and applications is available here.

Brandon Clifford has gone to Rome to look for ghosts. An assistant professor in the Department of Architecture, Clifford is in the Eternal City on a yearlong residency at the American Academy, one of approximately 30 American scholars to be awarded the Founders Rome Prize fellowship for 2017-18. His project, “Ghosts of Rome,” continues his innovative research into how ancient knowledge can engage with current technologies.

Five join the SA+P faculty, while 10 are recognized for work in art, architecture, urbanism, and design.

The School of Architecture and Planning has announced that 10 faculty members have been recognized with promotions.

In addition, five new professors have joined the school in the Department of Architecture, the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and the Program in Media Arts and Sciences. Their research ranges from architectural history to disaster resilience to the design of prosthetics.

A multidisciplinary team of MIT students and postdocs wins an international competition focused on building sustainably on Mars.

How will people live on Mars? An MIT team developed a design concept addressing this question as part of Mars City Design 2017, an international competition focused on sustainable cities on Mars to be built in the next century.

Two projects led by MIT faculty—a greenhouse in Massachusetts heralded as a “virtuosity of integration” and a plan to weave together working and living in a neighborhood in Cartagena, Colombia—were recognized in this year’s LafargeHolcim Awards for Sustainable Construction.

Responding to the theme of “Imminent Commons,” a diverse contingent of MIT faculty, researchers, and alumni from the School of Architecture and Planning are participating in the first Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, which is being held from Sept. 2 through Nov. 5.

Professors Rania Ghosn and Caroline Jones joined Professor Rosalind Williams of the MIT Program on Science, Technology, and Society in responding to speaker Imre Szeman, a professor of communication and culture at the University of Waterloo.

“We moderns still tend to take energy as a largely neutral aspect of social life,” Szeman said. “But the forms of energy we use, and how we use them, shape society through and through.”

This fall, the Department of Architecture will host a series of online information sessions to enable more prospective Master of Architecture (MArch) and Master of Science (Architecture Studies, SMArchS; Building Technology, SMBT) students to learn about admissions, programs, school culture, and research at MIT. There will not be an on-site open house this fall. Please note that visiting campus does not affect admissions and we will host an open house for accepted students in Spring 2018.

The book, “Public Space? Lost and Found,” published by the MIT Press, is co-edited by Urbonas, who is also director of MIT’s Program in Art, Culture, and Technology (ACT); Ann Lui, an assistant professor at the Art Institute of Chicago; and Lucas Freeman, a writer in residence at ACT.

“Art teaches us how to disrupt, in order to create a new public space,” Urbonas says. “The point of art is not scaling up answers, but to tackle painful questions, to provoke and mobilize humanity to find the answers themselves, or to create a space of possibility where the truth can be found.”

The professional master's of architecture program at MIT has again been ranked among the top five in the nation in the latest DesignIntelligence rankings. MIT's architecture program has consistently appeared among the top 10 in this annual assessment of nationally accredited graduate programs.

In ratings of specific skills areas, MIT’s graduate architecture program ranked second in research.

As Hurricane Irma bears down on the U.S., the MIT Urban Risk Lab has launched a free, open-source platform that will help residents and government officials track flooding in Broward County, Florida. The platform, RiskMap.us, is being piloted to enable both residents and emergency managers to obtain better information on flooding conditions in near-real time.

DESIGN EARTH, the design practice of Assistant Professor Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy, is among four design firms selected as winners of the 2017 Design Biennial Boston, which seeks to support emerging architects, landscape architects, and designers from the New England area and provide a platform to test their ideas in the public realm.

Graduate orientation includes Institute-wide events organized by the Graduate Student Council (GSC) as well as events that are specifically for Architecture students. Incoming graduate students are encouraged to attend the GSC events that can be found here. https://gsc.mit.edu/orientation/2017/home

Three SA+P graduate students and three recent MIT alumni have been awarded Fulbright U.S. Student Program grants to conduct independent research projects overseas during the coming academic year. In addition, a graduate student alumnus was named a Fulbright Finalist but declined the award.

Graduate student Alpha Arsano wants to bring natural ventilation to the forefront of modern architecture.

Alpha Arsano is standing next to the MIT Chapel’s marble altar, admiring the view through the domed skylight above. Outside, water surrounds the cylindrical red-brick structure like a shallow moat. Inside the chapel, the brick walls ripple like waves. Tiny windows line the walls and face downward so guests can see slivers of the moat. When sunlight reflects off the water at a certain angle, it shines into the chapel and dances onto the walls.

While on location in remote areas of Kenya, researching automation and home manufacturing for his doctoral dissertation, Kenfield Griffith PhD Computation ’12 encountered a significant lack of data.

For example, information he needed about whether people had access to indoor plumbing was scarce or nonexistent — and conducting traditional surveys to gather the data would be arduous and time consuming. But nearly all rural Kenyans, he realized, had texting-capable cell phones.

The Graham Foundation has announced over $560,000 in new grants to individuals around the world that engage original ideas in architecture. Five of this year's seventy-two funded projects were from members of the SA+P community including: Architecture's Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy; DUSP PhD candidate Suzanne Harris-Brandts; Caitlin Berrigan SMVisS ’09; Daniel Cardoso Llach SMArchS ’07, PhD ’12; and Nathan Friedman SMArchS ’15.

Professor Anderson's legacy at MIT stretched from his scholarship and teaching to program building. This symposium will be an opportunity to reflect on his efforts by means of three roundtables chared by HTC alumni and his former students. The History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art program and the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture co-host the Memorial Symposium in honor of Professor Emeritus Stanford Anderson (1934-2016).

Public Space? Lost and Found explores the contemporary evolution of public space from the milieu of design and artistic thinking and practice at the civic scale. It gathers an eclectic cast of practitioners and theorists of the public domain and welcomes all readers interested in how the production of public space plays out (or could play out) under interrelated, accelerating conditions shaping the present, such as ubiquitous computing, climate change, economic austerity, and the rise of various stripes of political extremism and isolationism.

Olivia Huang (M.Arch '18) and Akshita Sivakumar (SMArchS '17) were nominated and honored at the 2017 Graduate Women of Excellence Reception. Each honoree was nominated by a member of the MIT Community in recognition of her leadership and service, dedication to mentorship and drive to improve the student experience. Below, Olivia and Akshita answer a few questions on their work inside and outside of MIT for the Office of the Dean of Graduate Education (ODGE).

Brandon Clifford, Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture, has been awarded The Founders Rome Prize for 2017-2018 from the American Academy in Rome for his project titled "Ghosts of Rome."

Who doesn’t like a good story about art, international espionage, and global commerce? Consider this one. In 1765, the French government of Louis XV dispatched two emissaries to China with six large tapestries intended for the Qianlong emperor. In theory, this was a gesture of Enlightenment universalism by France’s minister of state, Henri-Leonard Bertin.

Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy of DESIGN EARTH are among four designers chosen to create installations on the Rose Kennedy Greenway as part of the fifth Design Biennial Boston. “The powerful drawings and installations of these exceptional designers make visible—in a profound and terrifyingly beautiful way—the deep and damaging impact that human activity has had on the earth and the consequences of that impact for our continued inhabitation of the planet,” said juror Keith Krumwiede on DESIGN EARTH’s work.

Azra Aksamija, Associate Professor in the Program in Art, Culture and Technology, and Nasser Rabbat, Aga Khan Professor and Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, talk to The Tech about their immigrant experience and how it informs their work and teaching as part of the Tech Transfers project, a photo series by Professor Daniel Jackson that features immigrant members of MIT.

“Imagine a structure that is quick to assemble, easy to transport and offers shelter in the aftermath of a natural disaster. Now, imagine one that can assemble itself in mid-air. This is the vision of a group of students from the Masters of Architecture Options Studio at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)," writes Alexandra Simon-Lewis for Wired Magazine on the Fall 2016 Options Studio 'Fast, Cheap and Out of the Box'.

The Tozzer Anthropology Building by Kennedy Violich Architecture, the architectural practice of Professor Sheila Kennedy, received an Architecture Merit award from the 2017 American Institute of Architects New York (AIANY) Design Awards. The project will be part of the Center for Architecture 2017 Design Awards Exhibition, on view April 21 through June 20, 2017.

Zain Karsan (M.Arch ‘18) is the recipient of the 2017 QuarraMatter Fellowship. Now in its third year, the QuarraMatter Fellowship allows students to spend a summer working with Quarra Stone, a stone fabricator in Madison, Wisconsin. Two fellows work closely with fabricators at Quarra to develop and implement a large-scale stone artifact; the intent of the research is to build processes that improve accuracy in production techniques and reduce the gap between drawing, modeling, and making.

Kristel Smentek's presentation entitled “Bouchardon, P.-J. Mariette, and the ‘Pure Taste’ of the Antique” is part of The Getty Center's symposium "Bouchardon and His Contemporaries" and examines mid-eighteenth-century conceptions of ancient Greek art and the role of antique engraved gems in constructions of a "pure" Greek style.

For the third year in a row, MIT has been named the top university in the world for “Architecture/Built Environment” in the latest subject rankings from QS World University Rankings. In “Art and Design,” the Institute ranked No. 2 globally for the second year in a row.

Designing energy-efficient buildings can be challenging: Incorporating features that decrease the energy needed to run them often increases the energy-intensive materials required to build them, and vice versa. Now an MIT team has demonstrated a computer simulation that can help architects optimize their designs for both future operational energy and the initial energy required for making structural materials — at the same time.

Building 7 is most known for the soaring four-story lobby that greets visitors who enter the campus from Massachusetts Avenue. Not as widely recognized is that the building is home to four galleries that feature regular exhibitions of art, architecture, and design.

First year seminar inspires students to see the world with fresh eyes.

On a crisp afternoon in early September, seven MIT first year undergraduate students set out on a campus tour with their faculty advisor, John Ochsendorf, the Class of 1942 Professor in Architecture and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Their first stop was “The Big Sail,” the 33-ton steel sculpture by Alexander Calder that stands in McDermott Court.

Research shows how rebuilding Britain’s Houses of Parliament in the 1800s helped create clean-air laws.

Britain’s dazzling Houses of Parliament building, constructed from 1840 until 1870, is an international icon. But the building’s greatest legacy may be something politicians and tourists don’t think about much: the clean air around it.

Oscar Rosello, pursuing a Master degree in SMarchS Design and Computation, received Best Poster Award at the 29th ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium in October in Tokyo. The ACM Symposium (UIST) is the premiere forum for human-computer interface design and brings together research in virtual/augmented reality, multimedia, input/output devices, and graphical interfaces.

The School of Architecture and Planning and the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism (LCAU) at MIT have established a long-term initiative to rethink the future of affordable housing in Brazil, which faces an estimated shortage of 7 million units.

The School of Architecture and Planning has announced that seven faculty members have been recognized by being promoted, granted tenure, or given significant new roles, and four new faculty joined their ranks. Among these are six faculty from the Department of Architecture.

A number of alumni and faculty are participating in the annual Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) Conference, October 24-28, 2016. This year’s theme “Posthuman Frontiers: Data, Designers and Cognitive Machines” aims to discuss work at the intersection of procedural design, designed environments, and autonomous machines.

Professor and Department Head J. Meejin Yoon will receive the ACADIA 2016 Teaching Award of Excellence and deliver a keynote lecture on October 28.

Seattle-based mwworks, an architecture studio best known residences and strong contextual work that knits into landscape, has received the 2016 Northwest and Pacific Region Emerging Firm Award from the American Institute of Architects (AIA). The award recognizes emerging firms less than ten years old that are challenging traditional perceptions and methods of architecture. The AIA Northwest and Pacific Region (NWPR) includes the states of Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Montana, Idaho and Hawaii, and the territory of Guam.

The professional master's of architecture program at MIT has tied for second in the nation in the latest DesignIntelligence rankings, a jump from fifth position last year. MIT's architecture program has consistently appeared among the top 10 in this annual assessment of nationally accredited graduate programs.

In ratings of specific skills areas, MIT’s graduate architecture program ranked first in computer applications, second in sustainability, and third in construction methods and materials.

Please join us in congratulating Jongwan Kwon, M.Arch '16, on receipt of the 2016 SOM Prize in Architecture, an annual $50,000 research and travel prize. Jongwan's research proposal, "After Efficiency: Logistics Infrastructure from a Regional Perspective," focuses on the impact of major international gateways (ports, airports, canals and tunnels) on their regional environments.

“Grove represents a significant advancement in architectural form-making. By combining composite-based structural analysis with inflatable vinyl forms, GLD has developed a workflow that embeds structural logic into design from the very start—and at a low cost,” writes Nate Berg.

One graduate student and two recent alumni are recipients of the 2016-2017 Fulbright Grants. PhD Candidate Christianna Bonin and alumni Aurimas Bukauskas and Elizabeth Yarina will spend the coming year in Russia, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand, respectively.

The National Endowment for the Arts has awarded MIT’s Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) of the School of Architecture and Planning an NEA Art Works grant to support the digitization and online presentation of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) Special Collection.

Alumnus Robert White, (M.Arch '15), J. Meejin Yoon, Professor, Department Head, and Principal of Höweler + Yoon Architecture, and Alex Anmahian, Lecturer and Principal of Anmahian Winton Architects, are three of four winners of the Northern Avenue Bridge Ideas Competition organized by the City of Boston and the Boston Society of Architects.

The department congratulates the recipients of the 2016 Schlossman Research Fellowship, Louis C. Rosenberg (1913) Travel Fellowship, the Marvin Goody Award, and the Julian Beinart Research Award. Students will present their research in Spring 2017.

Suk Lee, MA'15, is winner of the First Award in the area of Institutional Building for his thesis concept, MIT I2—Idea Incubator, a project that explores the future of the campus and online learning with structures on and below the Charles River.

Design Earth, a collaborative practice led by MIT Assistant Professor Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy, and The Open Workshop, the practice of Neeraj Bhatia SM '07, are two of six architecture and design offices selected for the 2016 prize. The award is given to architects and designers who are no more than 10 years out of school.

MIT has named its Center for Advanced Urbanism (CAU) in honor of Norman B. Leventhal '38, a visionary developer and philanthropist at the center of Boston’s postwar revival. A life member emeritus of the MIT Corporation who died last year, Mr. Leventhal was a vital member of the MIT community for three-quarters of a century.

The center was officially named the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism today at a signing ceremony attended by Alan and Sherry Leventhal and other members of Norman Leventhal’s extended family.

HTC alumnus Karl Haglund PhD '97 and faculty/alumnus Mark Jarzombek PhD '86 featured in MIT Alumni Associations' s VIDEO: "Island on the Charles" as part of the MIT Centennial Celebration on the MIT Campus. The following article describes the video. Images above include only one of the island ideas.

MITArchA is the newly formed MIT Architecture Alumni affinity group, within the MIT Alumni Association. Open to all MIT Architecture Alumni, undergraduates and graduates, as well as current students and friends of the program, MITArchA is our forum to connect with each other, with current students and faculty, the School of Architecture and Planning and the Institute at Large.

Professor and Department of Architecture head J. Meejin Yoon has been awarded the 2016 Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) Teaching Award of Excellence. The jury cited Yoon’s “innovative and critical pedagogical approach to integrating new ideas, techniques and technologies into her teaching and research. This approach is supported by excellence in academic leadership, scholarship and professional practice.”

"MIT2016: Celebrating a century in Cambridge" commemorates the Institute’s 1916 move from Boston’s Back Bay as it honors MIT’s special relationship with the City of Cambridge and looks toward the frontiers of the future. On Saturday, April 23, 2016, the entire campus will be open for a day-long participatory Open House.

The Department of Architecture will launch a new Minor in Design (D-Minor) in Fall 2016. "Undergraduates across MIT are excited about design. They’re participating in increasing numbers in classes and research projects that engage challenging, multi-disciplinary design problems. We are delighted to now offer our very creative and talented undergrads a more structured opportunity to pursue their particular design interests," says Terry Knight, Professor of Design and Computation and Design Minor Advisor.

The Department of Architecture welcomes admitted freshmen and their parents to an Open House, Department Tour and an Open Studio, April 7-10. Visitors can sit in on classes and participate in other related events.

Nineteen from the Department of Architecture Alumni, Faculty and Students are participating at the Annual Conference of the Scoiety of Architectural Historians. Sorted by group, each list is in event order by date and time of the panel session or roundtable, so some people are listed twice.

Nathan Brown, Architecture student in the Master of Science in Building Technology Program is the recipient of the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) Foundation 2016 Structural Engineering Traveling Fellowship.

The Institute will commemorate its move to Cambridge and the dedication of the Main Group with academic and celebratory programming beginning on the last day of February and concluding on Commencement and Reunion weekend. Festivities are outlined in the event schedule below and will include a special centenary exhibit at the MIT Museum, academic symposia, music and theater arts performances, and events—including an Open House—that welcome members of the MIT community, our neighbors, and friends.

David Adjaye presents his keynote lecture, "Geography, History, Community: Designing to Context", as part of his McDermott Prize in the Arts at MIT Residency on Tuesday, March 29 at 5:00 PM in Lecture Hall 10-250.

MIT faculty, students, and alumni consistently find creative ways to apply their knowledge to local contexts, collaborating with partners around the globe to make the world a better place. Arguably, no MIT exchange is more fertile than the one the School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) enjoys with Mexico.

Matter Design and Quarra Stone have announced this week that Inés Ariza of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Shan Sutherland of the University of Michigan have been selected as the 2016 QuarraMatter Fellows.

The following obituary was graciously provided to us by the family of Professor Myer:

John Randolph Myer, known as Jack to his friends and family, died of natural causes on February 17th, surrounded by his family. He was 89 years old. Mr. Myer was a prominent Boston architect, founder of Arrowstreet, Inc. and was department head of MIT’s Department of Architecture from 1982-1987. With Kevin Lynch, and others, Jack Myer was instrumental in the Downtown Waterfront Renewal Plan, the Boston Architectural Center, and the Massachusetts State Archives Building.

The "Heart of Hearts” pavilion, designed by Collective—LOK, opened in Father Duffy Square in Times Square, NYC on February 9th, 2016. It will remain on view through March 6, 2016.--Love for Times Square: MIT professor, PhD candidate design Valentine’s Day pavilion for New York City.http://news.mit.edu/2015/love-for-times-square-art-installation-1228

A team of four students – David Birge, Gabriel Kozlowski, Difei Xu (SMArchS Urbanism ’15) and Barry Beagan (M.Arch ’15) received Second Prize in the invited International Student Urban Design Competition for Shanghai Railway Station Area.

Congratulations to Dessen Hillman (SMArchS 2014) and Erioseto Hendranata (MArch 2014) recipients of the 2015 Lawrence B. Anderson Award for their proposal, "Rediscovering Communal Spaces Through The Everyday Rituals in Indonesia.” The award will help them to study traditional cultures and their rituals across Indonesia in order to learn and uncover knowledge on communal spaces that can inform larger current architecture design discussions.

Landlines: Drawing Terrain is an exhibition of drawings that reflect on the capacity of line to represent a contentious surface. There are eight methods of representing islands in this exhibition; the grouping of drawings positions these methods in relation to one another. There are a total of 24 drawings and 6 animations, organized into eight sets: projecting, hatching, growing, graining, slitting, animating, dashing, and boiding.

Claudia Bode, M.Arch 2015, is included in Wallpaper Magazine’s Graduate Directory for 2016. Bode’s thesis examines the challenges of the ‘Green Heart’, an agricultural area situated in the center of the Randstad, a metropolis in the western Netherlands. The region faces multiple challenges, including the need to accommodate for water as a strategy to deal with climate change, and the difficult task of operating small family dairy farms in an increasingly globalized market.

Skylar Tibbits, Research Scientist and Director of the Self-Assembly Lab, was named the Innovator of the Year by R&D Magazine at the annual R&D 100 Awards. The award is presented each year to an “individual or team who has demonstrated leadership, creativity, entrepreneurial spirit and success in the pursuit of science and technology.” It is the magazine’s top individual award.

The arc of technological innovation in the practices of architecture and construction have continually emerged out of a ritual desire for improved mechanical advantage, control over material behaviour and enhanced complexity in design and making. Despite these advances the material world has never ceased to provide ample resistance to this attempt of control; matter remains dynamic, undomesticated, and wild. It is through this wildness that materials challenge the design ideas and intentions that we base so much of our efforts on.

Eight student-led teams hoping to launch ventures ranging from real estate development, to urban diagnostics, to novel design solutions for schoolchildren have been selected as the inaugural cohort for DesignX, the new entrepreneurship accelerator from MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P).

Archinect's Paul Petrunia and Amelia Taylor-Hochberg sat down with SA+P Dean Hashim Sarkis to hear his perspective in comparing architecture education and practice.

"Our interview revolves around the same questions we ask in our Deans List series – how architecture education and practice are changing, how to address student needs, MIT’s particular take on how to cultivate exceptional architects, and the culture of the school in a global urban context."

Professor of the Practice Sheila Kennedy and her team at Kennedy Voilich Architecture (KVA), designed an innovative entryway as part of their transformation of Harvard's Tozzer Building, which was recently awarded a Best in Class prize from the Brick Industry Association of America. The entryway evokes ancient monuments while harnessing state-of-the-art computational design.

A former SMArchS thesis project has found its way into outer space! Pupil Lab, founded by alumni Will Patera and Moritz Kassner (SMArchS Computation, ’12), created custom vision headsets for Space Application Services as part of the Mobile Procedure Viewer (mobiPV) project. The headset captures the astronaut’s field of vision and allows for real-time video to be streamed to mission control where specialists can engage astronauts in real-time consultation and without lengthy delays.

J. Meejin Yoon, a professor and head of the Department of Architecture, was honored this week with the 2015 New Generation Leader award at a ceremony held Oct. 6 by Architectural Record as part of the magazine’s second annual Women in Architecture Forum and Awards event.

Joining faculty from different discipline groups, the Cross-Studios are a new model of teaching studios in the Department of Architecture. The cross-studios allow students to experience novel and innovative research that bridges between design, history, and engineering.

Thank you so much for joining us for the MIT Architecture Graduate Open House! We had a wonderful time meeting you and we hope that you had a great time learning about MIT. You can find the Open House booklet with schedule and departmental information to the right under "download".

If you have any questions or missed the Open House and would like to arrange a visit, please contact arch@mit.edu.

The first issue of 3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing was released under the editorship of Skylar Tibbits, faculty and Director of the Self-Assembly Lab. Tibbits takes over the position from Hod Lipson of Cornell University.

A new film highlights the Course 4 Undergraduate Program in Architecture. Watch the video to see the work and hear from our current Course 4 students and recent alumni, here.

"The magical thing about Course 4 is it teaches you how to take your creativity and design ideas and translate them into physical realities that are spatial, occupiable, inhabitable and have a powerful cultural resonance," said Meejin Yoon, Professor and Department Head.

A new group has formed to offer opportunities for alumni of MIT architecture to connect and re-connect with each other, current students, and the Department of Architecture, as well as the School of Architecture and Planning and the Institute at large.

The MIT Architecture Alumni group—or MITArchA, pronounced "mit-ARK-ah", for short—was proposed and formed by alumni of the school, led by Jacob Kain MArch ’00. Official approval by the Alumni Association is pending, with a formal vote schedule for Sept. 24, 2015.

Three MArch students, Tengjia Liu, Kun Qian and Marwan Abou Dib recently created Tekuma, to help bridge the divide between creators of art and potential clientele, with the help of the MIT Global Founders’ Skills Accelerator. Their goal is to set up physical exhibition spaces in apartments listed on rental sites that can be accessed digitally, and to facilitate the sale of exhibited artwork.

Assistant Professor Joel Lamere and his firm GLD, lecturer Cristina Parreño Alonso of Cristina Parreño Architecture, and Marie Law Adams MArch '06 with Landing Studio, designed three of four installations for the 2015 Design Biennial Boston.

The installations are on view on the Rose Kennedy Greenway in downtown Boston through Sept. 25, 2015.

NESEA will be awarding nine scholarships to students and recent graduates through the Kate Goldstein Award for Emerging Professionals in Sustainable Energy. Award recipients will receive scholarships to attend NESEA conferences or enrollment in a Masters Series online course in sustainability.

The Nomination Period for the scholarships has been extended to September 10. Take a moment today to nominate yourself or someone you know.

Three students from our MArch and SMArchS program have joined the faculties at Rice School of Architecture, Knowlton School of Architecture at the Ohio State University and School of the Art Institute of Chicago:

David Costanza (MArch '13, SMBT '15) joins Rice School of Architecture as First Technology Fellow

Aurimas Bukauskas, BSA '15, won the Carroll R. Wilson Award last Spring for his project "Whole-Section Timber and Bamboo: Naturally-Engineered High-Performance Structures". The award comes with a financial stipend of $25,000 to cover research travel costs.

Höweler + Yoon's ShadowPlay opened recently in downtown Phoenix, Arizona. The project is a public parasol at an urban scale formed by an aggregation of geometric modules. Together, the modules create a hovering canopy which filters the intense Phoenix sun, casting variable shadows on the pedestrian space throughout the day. Photovoltaic panels mounted to the top surface of several cells generates the power to illuminate the parasol in the evening.

Timothy Hyde is guest editor of the latest issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of Architectural Education. Entitled "Crisis," the issue includes an editorial by Hyde, as well as the work of Rania Ghosn and alumna Panayiota Pyla (PhD'02).

Last winter painfully highlighted the public transportation challenges facing the Greater Boston region, as the struggles of the T became the struggles of Bostonians and Massachusetts residents to get to work and manage their daily lives.

Michael Kubo, PhD Candidate, and Michael Rakowitz, SMVisS '98, are among the 2015 winners of the Graham Foundation grants.

Kubo's work, HEROIC: Concrete Architecture and the New Boston, co-authored with Chris Grimley and Mark Pasnik, won in the Publication group. The piece examines the "powerful, civic-minded legacy" of Boston's architecture from 1960 until 1976.

Matter Design and Quarra Stone have announced this week that Dustin Brugmann of the University of Michigan and Luisel Zayas of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been selected as the inaugural 2015 QuarraMatter Fellows.

Architectural Design Professor Sheila Kennedy's work with inexpensive materials to create flexible public infrastructure, such as cardboard street lights, is featured in a CBS News video. Prof. Kennedy describes the project and its applications, and discusses the ideas behind it. In her position as visiting professor at UC Berkeley, where she is the 2014 Berkeley-Rupp Prize winner, she has developed a studio called Here There to design practical solutions for the developing world.

"[W]hat I most want is for us to have a debate about what is appropriate for an engineer to do when approaching a structure that’s more than a century old and where we have an obligation to think beyond our own lifetimes when we intervene," says Professor John Ochsendorf in a recent interview with Nautilus Magazine for its issue on Error. Ochsendorf, who teaches architecture and engineering, discusses the Masonry Research Group's current work testing the structural limits of the Pantheon, his past work on Incan woven suspension bridges, engineering interventions in historical buildings, amo

Landing Studio, founded in 2005 by Marie Adams (MArch ’06) and Dan Adams, was named one of the six recipients of the 2015 Architectural League Young Architects and Designers Award. Landing Studio’s work focuses on the intersections of architecture, infrastructure, and landscape in industrial settings, which often dwell in uneasy alliance. Their clients and projects range from port facilities and ocean transport to demolition plans and shared industrial/public park landscapes.

Buildings of the future may be lit by collections of glowing plants and designed around an infrastructure of sunlight harvesting, water transport, and soil collecting and composting systems. That’s the vision behind an interdisciplinary collaboration between an MIT architecture professor and a professor of chemical engineering.